[ogoffart]

> Seriously, its $CURRENT_YEAR and getting a simple cross platform windowed graphical application up and running is still a pain?

$CURRENT_YEAR was 2018. Really early in the Rust history. There are now a bunch of Rust GUI framework to choose from.

[0xcde4c3db]

This is definitely a tangent, but the thing that bugs me is that I think it's not really so much a Rust problem as a general desktop app problem. It feels seriously wrong to me that we're embedding Chromium or linking megabytes of crusty GUI library code (some old enough that it has its own "future-proof" string type invented when Unicode was still 16-bit) into the app's address space instead of something that looks more like "open the NeoNeWS+Tk socket and utter a few TLVs, and it Just Works" (maybe C programmers need to remember to call fflush(), though). Instead we're expected to be impressed when Electron adds native Wayland support.

And I mean... it's not wrong to be impressed at the effort or the people involved, but I'm not sure what we're actually doing here.

[tonyarkles]

I’ve played a bit with CLI Rust but haven’t yet tried diving into GUI Rust. The language feels like it aught to be great for making really robust and performant GUIs but when I look at lists like this: https://blog.logrocket.com/state-rust-gui-libraries/ I generally feel disappointed… it’s GTK4, FLTK, or embed a web browser? Am I missing something? Is there a great Rust GUI library that is both lightweight and looks good?

[ogoffart]

> Is there a great Rust GUI library that is both lightweight and looks good?

I'm going to say Slint. https://slint.rs

[tonyarkles]

Nice! I’ll have to play with it a bit!

Sigh, I was quite excited to see the embedded stuff with that but then discovered that you need a commercial license and pay royalties to use it in a non-GPL3 embedded device. But that’s the same story as Qt so it’s not all that unusual.